Monday, June 6, 2011

This week I’m going to try something new. I seem to have collected a number of pairings that illustrate rebrandings, but most of them don’t really qualify as Pr*tty or Sh*tty, so thus far I’ve had trouble finding a home for them.

Rebrandings are, of course, the domain of my good pals over at Brand New, but the pairings I’ll feature this week are either too old and/or too irrelevant to have been covered there, or on their B-Sides companion blog. So hopefully they won’t mind if a tread around the perimeter of their territory for a few days and go ahead and show them here.

I’ll offer up a few comments, but otherwise I’ll open the voting and let my exceptional readers decide whether the old or new identities are better.

Let’s get started.

Old:

New:

Even to a non-coffee-drinker like myself, the Eight O’Clock brand is highly recognizable, thanks in large part to the the handsome and distinct Bokar font designed by letterer extraordinaire Daniel Pelavin.

All-in-all, the rebranding is pretty decent, I think. The logotype lost some of its charm and distinctiveness, and the leaf-shaped apostrophe, and associated kerning, are pretty awful. But it could be a hell of a lot worse, and I think it feels more contemporary at the end of the day.